Selim Turan
Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Sabancı University
“Selim Turan: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis,” curated by art historian Necmi Sönmez, featured more than one hundred works, mostly selected from the trove of more than 250 donated to Istanbul University in 2003 by Selim Turan’s wife, ceramic artist Şahika Turan. (Those pieces are on loan to Sakıp Sabancı Museum while the historic university building undergoes restoration.) The exhibition also included single works by Turkish and foreign artists in Turan’s circle (İlhan Koman, Fahrelnissa Zeid—who has a solo show at Tate Modern in London—Jacques Germain, and Francis Bott, among others). This effort to contextualize Turan’s career will hopefully help pave the way for further research into the lives and works of Turkish artists who lived abroad between the end of the 1940s and the late ’70s.
Turan was born in Istanbul in 1915 and raised in an intellectual environment both at home (his father was an influential figure in the political and cultural milieu during the transition from the Ottoman state to the republic) and at school (he graduated from the prestigious bilingual Galatasaray Lycée and the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts). He moved to Paris in 1947 with a scholarship from the French government and continued to live and work in France until 1979, after which he divided his time between Paris and Istanbul until his death in 1994.
The exhibition’s Hegelian title, taken from an architectural piece Turan created in 1976 at La Teste-de-Buch in southwestern France, suggests the artist’s propensity to look for similarities and contradictions in life and its representations, to create metaphors and constantly question the medium and the meaning of things. Sönmez applied this framework in his curation of the show, interpreting Turan’s abstract paintings as his thesis and his later shift to figurative painting as an antithesis. Sönmez also showed Turan’s mobiles, presenting them in glass cases—they can be moved only by hand—and accompanying this display with sound installations by Su Somuncuoğlu and projected videos showing the objects in motion by Çağlar Karakuş. The mobiles contain shamanic figurines representing angels, birds, dervishes, and witches; the constant movement and sounds around them represent, according to the curator, the synthesis of contradictions.
Turan’s gestural abstract paintings of the 1950s and early ’60s can be interpreted as studies of Christian iconography (the crucifix is a recurrent motif) or Islamic calligraphy. He later turned to a painterly style of figuration: The 1980–85 “Blond Maiden” series, for instance, is based on a legend from Aegean folklore. The third phase of Turan’s career, however—what Sönmez calls the synthesis—incorporates fantastical figures from diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds in three-dimensional form. This show clarified the continuity among these diverse productions and displayed the richness of Turan’s imagery in the shape of birds, stones, and imaginary figures.
The exhibition catalogue includes archival material: invitations, letters, and published reviews of Turan’s solo and group shows. This presentation of Turan’s artistic journey benefited from the curator’s long acquaintance with him. Sönmez recalls that in 1986 Turan gave him a copy of The Conference of the Birds, by Persian Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar; Sönmez selected lines from the book, such as “How many leagues is this road?”; “Someone said, ‘I lost the key’”; and “You know the door is closed. Walk and reach that door,” to accompany the viewer through the exhibition and give clues to the work’s ambiguous meaning. As Sönmez points out, Turan always avoided making definitive statements and preferred silence.